Tecnos

Vol. XVII/3 1998

The Importance of Philosophy to Engineering

Carl Mitcham

Abstract

Philosophy has not paid sufficient attention to
engineering. Nevertheless, engineering should not use this as an excuse to
ignore philosophy. The argument here is that philosophy is important to
engineering for at least three reasons. First, philosophy is necessary so that
engineers may understand and defend themselves against philosophical
criticisms. In fact, there is a tradition of engineering philosophy that is
largely overlooked, even by engineers. Second, philosophy, especially ethics,
is necessary to help engineers deal with professional ethical problems. A case
study of ethics requirements for U.S. engineering curricula substantiates this
point. Third, because of the inherently philosophical character of engineering,
philosophy may actually function as a means to greater engineering
self-understanding.

The thesis of the present paper is that, common
presumptions to the contrary, philosophy is centrally important to engineering.
When engineers and engineering students - not to mention those who make use of
engineering services - dismiss philosophical analysis and reflection as
marginal to the practice of engineering, they are mistaken on at least two
counts: historical and professional.

It is also the case, I would argue, that engineering is
important to philosophy - and that philosophers have made woefully insufficient
efforts to appreciate and assess the technical realities that they too often
presume to criticize. Were philosophers to set their own discipline in order
with respect to engineering, philosophy would no doubt be even more important
to engineering than is presently the case.

Nevertheless, even granted the inadequate attention
conferred on engineering by philosophy, philosophy is of critical and
increasing significance to engineering. The argument in support of this thesis
will, appropriately enough, rely in key respects on engineering experience. It
will proceed by means of a historical review of engineering efforts to do
philosophy in part as a self-defense against philosophical criticism. Then, in
a central case study, it will summarize and reflect on efforts in the United
States professional engineering community to incorporate philosophy into
engineering education curricula. The later sections of the paper will, however,
make a more reflective effort to speculate about the deepening relations
between engineering and philosophy in an increasingly engineered world.
Engineers are, I will finally suggest, the unacknowledged philosophers of the
postmodern world.

1. SELF-DEFENSE AND PHILOSOPHY

Let me begin, then, with the issue of self-defense. As
preface to this issue, consider an engineering-like schematic presentation of
the problem. The problem is that engineering and philosophy are typically
conceived as two mutually exclusive domains, somewhat as follows:

In the minds of most people, engineering and philosophy
do not have much to do with each other. They are, as it were, giant islands
separated by a large body of water. 1

In fact, from the perspective of some members of the
engineering community - not to mention those of the philosophy community - the
situation is even worse. Engineering is customarily divided into a number of
different branches: civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical
engineering, chemical engineering, nuclear engineering, computer engineering,
etc. Something similar goes for philosophy. It too includes different branches:
logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy,
etc. Representatives of some of these areas of the philosophy world, especially
ethics and aesthetics, seem to have mounted canons on their areas of the
philosophy island in order to fire away at selected domains of the engineering
world.

At least since the 1960s, members of the philosophical
community or its fellow travellers have been accusing engineers of building
nuclear weapons that could destroy civilization as we know it, manufacturing
transportation systems that are a blight on urban culture, designing
communication technologies that can enhance central or authoritarian controls
by both governments and private corporations, creating computers that
depersonalize human life. Engineers have, in general, so the critics contend,
been polluting the natural world with toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases
while flooding the human world with ugly structures and useless consumer
products. 2

Martin Heidegger, one of the most prominent philosophers
of the 20th century, has even gone so far as to argue that all such ethical and
aesthetic failures are grounded in a fundamental engineering attitude toward
the world that reduces nature to resources in a dominating Gestell or
enframing3. Heidegger is perhaps more subtle on this point than is
always recognized. But on one common interpretation, Heidegger can be construed
to say that Herbert Simon's "sciences of the artificial,"4 for
example, promote a constrained and constraining ontology of mathematical
reduction and an epistemology of virtual reality. Feminist critics have even
associated engineering with patriarchal domination, the death of nature, and
the loss of world-centering care.5

What such charges amount to is a major reactionary attack
on the self-definition of engineering that goes back to the 18th century
formulation of Thomas Tredgold, and is reiterated in such standard reference
works as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science
and Technology. According to the classic and still standard definition that
engineers give of their own profession, engineering is "the application of
scientific principles to the optimal conversion of natural resources into
structures, machines, products, systems, and processes for the benefit of
humankind."6 The upshot of philosophical attacks would be to replace
this traditional self-understanding with one that might read more like the
following: "Engineering is the scientific art by which a particular group of
human beings destroys nature and pollutes the world in ways that are useless or
harmful to human life."7

Insofar as they have become aware of such attacks - and
to understand and defend against them - philosophy is crucial to engineers. In
the first instance, then, engineers have become involved with the study of
philosophy in order to respond, to erect some fortifications against the
philosophical onslaught. A whole school of engineer philosophers has in fact
taken up thiçs challenge, but it is a school that is incompletely
recognized even in engineering institutes and colleges - and certainly not in
the liberal arts faculties in which most philosophy is taught. Allow me simply
to mention in passing some representative contributors to this school or
tradition.8

First is Ernst Kapp (1808-1896), a contemporary of Karl
Marx. Although originally educated as a philosopher, Kapp emigrated from
Germany to central Texas, where he became a pioneer and developed a view of
technology as a complex extension or projection of human faculties and
activities. In a subsequent articulation of this philosophical anthropology of
technology, he became the person to coin the phrase "philosophy of technology"
or "philosophy of engineering."9

Next I would mention Peter Engelmeier (1855-c.1941), one
of the founders of Russian professional engineering. A hundred years ago
Engelmeier, under the banner of the phrase "philosophy of technology," argued
for a more than technical education of the engineering profession. If engineers
are to take their rightful place in world affairs, he argued, they must be
educated not only in their technical fields but also in knowledge about the
social impact and influence of technology.10

A third representative figure is Friedrich Dessauer,
certainly a pivotal contributor to this tradition of engineering philosophy of
technology. The inventor of deep-penetration x-ray therapy, a political
opponent of Nazism, and a technical professional in dialogue with such
philosophers as Karl Jaspers, José Ortega y Gasset, and Heidegger, among
others, Dessauer put forth an interpretation of engineering invention as an
experience that transcends the boundaries of Kantian phenomenal appearances and
makes contact with noumenal things-in-themselves.11

Independent of Dessauer's interpretation, and as a final
example of the engineering philosophy tradition, New York civil engineer Samuel
Florman has developed a related interpretation of "the existential pleasures of
engineering" that both responds to many of its contemporary philosophical
critics and defends engineering as in itself a fundamental human
activity12. Engineering is not only instrumental to other human
ends, it is in itself an existentially meaningful activity. Engineering possess
inherent or intrinsic as well as instrumental or extrinsic value.

In the first instance, then, philosophy is important to
engineering, because there are many who philosophically criticize engineering.
Out of self defense, if for no other reason, engineers should know something
about philosophy in order to handle their critics. Moreover, some engineers
have in fact taken up this challenge.

2. SELF-INTEREST AND PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy is also important, in a second instance,
because engineers actually face problems internally or professionally that they
admit cannot be resolved simply with engineering methods alone. I refer here
primarily of professional ethical issues.

There are times in the engineering world when engineers
ask themselves questions about what they should be doing or how they should do
it that cannot be solved by technical expertise alone. Although Clive Dym
methodologically excludes aesthetics - and, by extension, ethics - from his
analysis of design, in order to keep his discussion "bounded and manageable,"
he also grants that ethics often has a serious role to play in engineering
design13. Questions of safety, risk, and environmental protection
are only the more obvious manifestations of variables that call for ethical
judgment in assessing their proper influence on design decisions. Philosophy
(especially ethics) is an internal practical need of engineering - and is so
recognized by the professional engineering community.

To consider the point at issue here in a slightly fuller
manner, let me compare the roles played by the sciences and the liberal arts in
engineering education. For this purpose, allow me to examine, as an empirical
case study, the engineering education certification requirements in the United
States. By proceeding in this manner my aim is to let engineers, through their
own professional community, speak for themselves about how they think
philosophy is in the self-interest of engineers, and to provide some
complementary elaboration.

The organization that certifies U.S. engineering
education programs is the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology,
more commonly known by the acronym ABET. (ABET grew out of the Engineer's
Council for Professional Development or ECPD, which was founded in 1932.)

According to present ABET accreditation
criteria14, engineering programs require a minimum of

one year of mathematics and the basic sciences,

one half year of humanities and social sciences, and

one and a half years of engineering topics.

It is important to emphasize that these are minimal
content requirements - and that the standard engineering degree in the U.S.
requires four to five years of study.

These minimal content requirements exclude what are
called "skills" courses focusing on the development of competence in written
and oral communication, which are also required. If language communications
skills course requirements are included with humanities and social sciences
content course requirements - as they are in the traditional descriptions of
the liberal arts - then ABET effectively requires engineering students to
complete a year of studia humanitatis.

Consider now the justifications for the three primary
components of engineering education provided by ABET.

The engineering topics criterion, of course, needs no
justification, since it is engineering education that is at issue.
Nevertheless, it is useful to note that engineering topics are explicitly said
to include both the engineering sciences - as distinct from the basic sciences
- and engineering design - as distinct from other types of design
(IV.C.3.d.[3][a]).

As for the engineering sciences, these "have their roots
in mathematics and basic sciences but carry knowledge further toward creative
application" (IV.C.3.d.[3][b]). Such rootedness is what justifies course
requirements in mathematics and the basic sciences. In the words of the ABET
criteria: "The objective of the studies in basic sciences is to acquire
fundamental knowledge about nature and its phenomena, including quantitative
expression" (IV.C.3.d.[1][b]).

As for engineering design, this is defined as the process
of devising a system, component, or process to meet desired needs. It is a
decision-making process (often iterative), in which the basic sciences and
mathematics and engineering sciences are applied to convert resources optimally
to meet a stated objective (IV.C.3.d.[3][c].

Such an understanding of engineering design obviously
provides a second and supporting justification for mathematics and the basic
sciences.

But what about the half-year of liberal arts courses - or
year, if one includes studies of written and oral communications? What is the
justification for including the humanities and social sciences as a major
component of the curricular requirements for an engineering education?

Before citing the ABET criteria answer to this question,
note that the ABET criteria definition of engineering design silently drops one
crucial aspect of the traditional definition of engineering. As mentioned
earlier, Tredgold's and (until recently) the most commonly cited definition is
that engineering is "the application of scientific principles to the optimal
conversion of natural resources into structures, machines, products, systems,
and processes for the benefit of humankind." ABET replaces the end or goal of
being humanly useful and beneficial with simply meeting some "desired needs" or
"stated objective." The normative aspect of the traditional definition is thus
washed out in favor of a value-neutral or context-dependent process.

Therefore, at the point in the ABET criteria when the
humanities and social sciences content requirements are described and
justified, it is said that

Studies in the humanities and social sciences serve not
only to meet the objectives of a broad education but also to met the objectives
of the engineering profession. . . . In the interests of making engineers fully
aware of their social responsibilities and better able to consider related
factors in the decision-making process, institutions must require course work
in the humanities and social sciences as an integral part of the engineering
program. This philosophy cannot be overemphasized (IV.C.3.d.[2][a]).

In other words, once the goal of engineering design has
been reduced from being humanly useful and beneficial to a context-dependent
process, then the humanities and social sciences are presented as a means to
understand and evaluate such contexts. Otherwise engineers would just be hired
guns - and could serve the profession equally well as designers of
concentration camps or of green (non-polluting) chemical plants.

Thus, while mathematics and the basic sciences ground the
engineering sciences, the liberal arts ground (in a different but related way)
engineering design. Would it be too bold to conjecture that, just as the
engineering sciences are thought to extend the basic sciences, by carrying
"knowledge further toward creative application," so too engineering design may
be described as creatively applying some modes of thought and ideals of the
humanities and social sciences?

Consider briefly a contrast of two engineering
experiences that may be interpreted to support, from quite different angles,
just such a hypothesis. The first is imaginative, but real: that of Goethe's
Faust. In Faust II, having abandoned first his liberal studies and then crude
magic, Faust has become a civil engineer erecting dams and draining marshes -
yet inadvertently killing innocent people15. The second is
historical, but imaginatively reconstructed: the case of Russian engineer Peter
Palchinsky16. Executed by Stalin because he refused to separate
technical knowledge and humanistic ideals, it is the ghost of the executed
engineer Palchinsky that emerges triumphant in the glasnost that accompanied
the demise of the Soviet Union.

This point is reiterated at the end of the ABET criteria
content statement. After asserting that competence in communication "is
essential for the engineering graduate" (IV.C.3.i), it is further affirmed
that, "An understanding of the ethical, social, economic, and safety
considerations in engineering practice is essential for a successful
engineering career" (IV.C.3.j).

ABET is currently in the process of revising and
simplifying its criteria for accreditation. Its new criteria set, laid out in a
document called "Engineering Criteria 2000," confirms the present argument by
listing eleven "outcomes" upon which engineering programs will be assessed.
Beginning in the year 2000, to be accredited by ABET, "engineering programs
must demonstrate that their graduates have

(a) an ability to apply knowledge of mathematics,
science, and engineering

(b) an ability to design and conduct experiments, as well
as to analyze and interpret data

(c) an ability to design a system, component, or process
to meet desired needs

(d) an ability to function on multi-disciplinary
teams

(e) an ability to identify, formulate, and solve
engineering problems

(f) an understanding of professional and ethical
responsibility

(g) an ability to communicate effectively

(h) the broad education necessary to understand the
impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context

(i) a recognition of the need for, and an ability to
engage in life-long learning

(j) a knowledge of contemporary issues

(k) an ability to use the techniques, skills, and modern
engineering tools necessary for engineering practice.

Now of these eleven outcomes, four - or over one third -
may readily be classified as engaged with the liberal arts. Thus, again, in a
four-to-five year program, more than a year of course content can be expected
to be humanitas focused."Such course work," appealing again to existing
criteria, must meet the generally accepted definitions that humanities are the
branches of knowledge concerned with man [sic] and his [sic] culture, while
social sciences are the studies of individual relationships in and to society.
Examples of traditional subjects in these areas are philosophy, religions,
history, literature, fine arts, sociology, psychology, political science,
anthropology, economics, and foreign languages . . . . Nontraditional subjects
are exemplified by courses such as technology and human affairs, history of
technology, and professional ethics and social responsibility
(IV.C.3.d.[2][b]).

3. EXCURSUS: THREE QUESTIONS

This passage easily provokes at least three questions -
questions that entail a brief excursus. The questions are:

One, what does it mean to invoke "generally accepted
definitions" of the humanities and the social sciences? Are the humanities and
the social sciences, including philosophy, historically or socially
constructed?

Two, exactly what is philosophy anyway? What is the
relation between philosophy and the liberal arts? Is it perhaps the case that
philosophy - having been named first - could be more important than or
differentially significant from other humanities and social sciences?

Three, in light of the generally accepted definition of
philosophy as including ethics - together with statements here and previously
regarding the importance of professional ethics to "a successful engineering
career" - what is it, more concretely, that philosophy and ethics may do for
engineering?

These are all serious questions. They are not to be
answered either quickly or finally in the present paper. Indeed, they are the
kind of open questions designed to provoke extended reflection more than the
closure of straightforward solutions. It is nevertheless appropriate here to
begin to explore elements of what might be termed some boundary conditions on
such answers.

With regard to the first question: The passage is more
insightful than many in its cautionary reference to "generally accepted
definitions" of the humanities and the social sciences. It is indeed the case
that these definitions are historically, socially, societally, and culturally
constructed17. Such constructions as exist are also highly contested
- in differentially constructed ways.

In the U.S. this multi-layered contest - with its
contests about the contest - is known collectively and affectionately as "the
culture wars." One front in these wars is fought between protagonists of the
"dead white men" (from Homer on) school of culture and the "politically
correct" (we are the victims of discrimination) school - to use the warring
parties aspersion-casting names for each other. In this sense the ABET criteria
statement is at once cautious - and then anything but cautious, with its
description of the humanities as "concerned with man and his culture."

Leaving aside this egregious gaff, one may nonetheless
note that early on engineers opened their own front in the culture wars. As
John Staudenmaier has ably narrated in Technology's Storytellers, the founding
of the Society for the History of Technology in the late 1950s was done in part
by engineers who found themselves left out of Western history just as much as
women or various ethnic minorities18. History is technology as much
as politics, the engineer historians argued. The humanities and social sciences
have reflected the limited self-interests and ideological biases of
non-engineers - not to say of those who use humanities and social sciences
power/knowledge to discipline themselves and others19. Engineers
have an interest in opening up the black boxes in history, to notice that
political problems and their solutions often depend on engineering input, in
order to include not so much another group of victims as unrecognized
conquerors.20

The humanities and the social sciences, including
philosophy, are thus historically and socially constructed. But it is also
crucial to note that the same - although not so obviously - goes for
engineering. Both engineering and philosophy - to focus on that element of the
humanities and the social sciences most at issue here - have distinct
historical origins, and have not always been understood or practiced in the
past as they are today.

Philosophy emerged as a recognized human way of life in
5th century BCE Greece. According to Aristotle's account, philosophy originated
when human beings replaced speech about god or the gods with speech about
phusis or nature21. Today, however, few members of that community
which practices the discipline of philosophy - and discipline is not the same
as a way of life - speak or write about phusis or nature. They are more likely
to speak or write about phenomena and language.

Engineering, too, emerged as a recognized human activity
at a particular point in history - namely the 17th and 18th centuries. The
first engineers were members of the military who designed, constructed,
operated, and maintained fortifications and engines of war such as battering
rams, catapults, and canons. The term "civil engineer" originally denoted the
attempt to transfer the kind of activity and knowledge involved in such
military concerns into non-military contexts. The formulation of Tredgold's
definition of engineering, as cited earlier, was part of the historical and
social effort to bring about this displacement.

Indeed, both engineering and philosophy exhibit quite
different characteristics across geographies as well as histories - even if one
only compares cases from as closely related communities of discourse as those
of Europe and the United States.

It may be accepted, then, that both engineering and
philosophy are historically and socially constructed. Such an admission would
seem to grant to history and the social sciences priority in the liberal arts.

At the same time, history and society are not only about
change; they are also about continuities. Historical and social construction
is, after all, not ex nihilo. Indeed, it is perhaps better described not as
construction but as re-construction. Our efforts to name what is undergoing
historical re-construction - and thus what to some degree transcends history -
are themselves subject to revision. At any one point in time, however, we must
logically (if provisionally) accept our own socio-historical constructions
about how best to indicate such trans-sociohistorical - or perhaps better,
multi-sociohistorical - features of our constructs.

With regard to the second question in this excursus,
then, we inquire about what multi-sociohistorical features are exhibited by
philosophy. What is it about philosophy that, since its 5th century BCE
origins, has enabled us to speak about the presence of this or related
phenomena at other times and places? What is it that we mean now by
philosophy?

Today the common or uniting elements in philosophy
involve some mixture of the following:

Conceptual analysis, which helps us clarify and correct both
practical and theoretical uses of terms. This includes but is not limited to
logic.

Reflective examination of practice and thought, so as to deepen
insight and understanding of, extend, or criticize both dimensions of
experience. This includes the core areas of philosophy known as ethics,
epistemology, and metaphysics, often with an emphasis on their rational
methodologies.

Thinking about aspects of experience that are more global than
customarily dealt with by any one discipline. Here the emphasis is likely to be
more substantive than methodological. Such thinking may also involve inter-,
multi-, trans-, and anti-disciplinary consideration of what is right and good
(ethics), knowledge (epistemology), and the structure of reality (metaphysics).

The practice of a distinctive way of life and thought, one taken to
be good in itself, with its own unique knowledge of reality. Philosophy in this
sense may also be regionalized into the general guiding practices or principles
of an individual or group, as when we refer to someone's personal philosophy or
the philosophy of a firm.

In each of these manifestations philosophy may be further
described as engaged with non-empirical issues rather than empirical ones -
though not without empirical or real-world reference. Each of the core areas of
philosophy - ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics - exhibits both descriptive
and normative dimensions. But it is the normative dimension that is at once
crucial - and most difficult to pursue, without abandoning its conceptual and
critical dimensions.

It may also be noted, historically again, that philosophy
has functioned as a kind of seedbed from which many of the sciences and the
humanities have sprung. Natural philosophy gave rise to natural science; it was
philosophers such as Bacon and Descartes, together with natural philosophers
such as Galileo and Newton, who constructed the physical sciences. It was
social philosophers such as Comte, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber who constructed
the social sciences. From philosophical reflection and conceptual analysis have
also emerged economics, anthropology, psychology, religious studies, and other
humanities and social science disciplines. The very idea of a discipline,
defined either in terms of its object or its method, is one that philosophy in
its inter-, multi-, trans-, and anti-disciplinary thinking both conceptually
clarifies and reflectively criticizes.

In this way, particularly, philosophy does reasonably
appear to be differentially significant from the other humanities and social
sciences - to be, as it were, first among equals. Such significance provides
reason to hypothesize that philosophy, more than the other humanities and
social sciences, may matter to engineering in a special way.

Thus, with regard to the third question in this excursus
- a question that returns us again to the main theme - one may consider anew
what it is that philosophy, especially philosophy in the form of ethics,
contributes to professional engineering.

4. ENGINEERING AND ETHICS

It is certainly not the case that philosophy has
sponsored engineering in anything like the way it has sponsored the sciences,
the social sciences, and the humanities. Indeed, engineering has a strong
tendency to distinguish itself from philosophy, not in a manner that would
acknowledge philosophy as that from which it has emerged but as that in
relation to which it is definitively other.

As Louis Bucciarelli observes in his ethnographic studies
of engineers, when students are doing engineering problems it is generally
thought that they "ought not to get bogged down in useless `philosophical'
diversions."22 As he notes on more than one occasion, in the realm
of engineering philosophy has strongly negative connotations. Yet at the
conclusion of his study, Bucciarelli the engineer, having argued that
engineering design is a social process, points out how this means there are
alternatives. When there are alternatives, he says, then there can be better
and worse. In such a situation, "The really important and interesting question
becomes: What do we mean by a better design?"23 But such is an
eminently philosophical question.

Only through conceptual analysis, rational reflection,
and general modes of thought can such an issue adequately be addressed.
Precisely because of numerous specific manifestations of this type of question
- the question, that is, of "What do we mean by a better design?" - engineers
have built bridges, even though neither they nor philosophers may not always
have recognized them as such, from engineering to philosophy, especially to
that branch of philosophy constituted by ethics. So summarized again by means
of schematic diagram, the situation has been transformed from two mutually
exclusive circles to something like the following:

In the effort to begin to address design and operational
dilemmas that have emerged for scrutiny in such particular cases as the Ford
Pinto gas tank that was subject to rear-end collision explosions24,
the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Automatic Train Control system
failure25, DC-10 cargo bay door and engine mounts,26 the
field joints on the solid rocket booster of the space shuttle
Challenger27, - to cite only four well-known U.S. examples
representing the areas of automotive, computer, aeronautical, and structural
engineering - engineers themselves such as Stephen Unger28, Roland
Schinzinger29, Charles Harris and Michael Rabins30, Aarne
Vesilind and Alastair Gunn31, and others

have undertaken conceptual analyses of right and wrong, good and
bad, in engineering practice;

have sought a reflective deepening to their insight and
understanding of the ethical dimensions of engineering experience; and

have pursued interdisciplinary, cooperative research into
professional ethics codes, disciplinary procedures, moral educational
strategies, and more.

Yet beyond the efforts of these engineer ethicists to
analyze professional codes of conduct, reflectively enhance the ethical
dimensions of engineering practice, reconstruct professional organizations to
better support appropriate engineering autonomy, and engage in
interdisciplinary pedagogical efforts one can discern right in the core of the
engineering analysis of design a fundamentally ethical impulse. For want of a
better phrase, let me call this the imperative to remain
connected.32

A failure to remain connected to the limitations of the
human condition is, for instance, one way to define the problem of Faust as
engineer. A determination to remain connected to what is pragmatically known
about the world is what has cost many engineers such as Palchinsky their jobs
if not their lives.

One of the drivers behind Clive Dym's computer modelling
of design representation, for instance, is to promote communication between
design engineers and construction personnel that would avoid the kind of
disaster precipitated, as in the Kansas City Hyatt Regency atrium walkway
failure, by a fabricator failure to grasp the significance of a crucial design
specification33. The Hyatt Regency contractor error was, in turn,
set up by a design engineering failure to recognize the construction problem
entailed by the crucial design specification at issue.

Hanger rods long enough to transmit a second floor
walkway load through the fourth floor walkway, directly to the roof trusses
above, were not available. The contractor, not understanding the load transfer
dynamics involved, substituted two rods instead, in effect hanging the second
floor walkway from the fourth floor walkway. The identified need for better
communication - that is, better connection - between design intention and
construction reification, is a moral as well as a technical imperative.

It may well be the case that, as engineer Henry Petroski
argues, design failures are inherent in the fallible practice of engineering
and the learning curve that constitutes technical progress34. But
conceptual analysis and reflective examination reveal that not all failures are
equal. Moreover, philosophical analysis and reflection are part of the very
process by which engineers learn from design failures. Again, Clive Dym's work
on the languages of representation in design is a case in point.

It is central to the argument at this point to note that
disciplines ought not to be conceived so much as barriers to all trespassers,
as selective niches for the promotion of differential growth. We are all to
some extent engineers, insofar as we design, construct, and operate in the
microworlds of our lives. Something as simple as packing a box is a quotidian
mini-design problem. Likewise, we are all to some extent students of
philosophy, insofar as we undertake to conceptually analyze, reflect on, and
generalize about aspects of our lives and works.

Only because this is the case - only because we are
selectively enhanced persons - is it possible and does it make sense for us to
reach out and call to another differentially enhanced individual or community
of practitioners for assistance. Because engineers already to some extent do
philosophy, it makes sense for them to build bridges to philosophers (who also
already to some extent practice engineering) and ask for assistance. This is
precisely what engineers such as Unger, Schinzinger, and Rabins have done - to
which philosophers such as Tom Rogers, Mike Martin, and Michael Pritchard have
responded35. In each case we have more than simple bridge building
between engineering and ethics. What we now see is the actual partial merging
or overlapping of the engineering and philosophy worlds, which may be
represented thus:

5. SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND PHILOSOPHY: BEYOND APPLIED
ETHICS

Engineering in the past may have been historically and
socially constructed so as to alienate philosophy. Philosophy in the past may
also have sought to keep engineering at bay. But times and the world change.
Engineering has changed. It has, I would even venture to suggest, become much
more philosophical. Indeed, engineering is ripe not just with philosophical
problems but with a philosophically significant way of life. Philosophy, for
its part, is becoming much more open to engineering thought and practice -
though not as fully or as fast as some think appropriate.

Why is philosophy important to engineering? The first
reason, I have argued, is self defense against philosophical critics. The
second reason is self interest, to help deal with issues of social context and
ethics within engineering practice. But there is also a third reason why
philosophy is important to engineering: engineering is modelling a new
philosophy of life. In this instance there is some tectonic plate movement. Not
just bridges are built, but continents actually begin to overlap and
geologically alter each other.

But just as tectonic plate movement is imperceptibly slow
and thus difficult to appreciate, so too is this third interaction of
engineering and philosophy. It is also an interaction that is both grounded in
and calls for increased self-knowledge on the part of all participants.

What might conceptual analysis, reflective insight, and
interdisciplinary thinking have to contribute to engineering? To pose the
question in this way is virtually to answer it. Is not engineering, too,
characterized by conceptual analysis, reflective insight, and interdisciplinary
thinking?

As we increasingly construct the world we increasingly
recognize the world as constructed. As human beings have moved from a natural
to a carpentered and then engineered world, surely it is no accident that
natures and essences have been called into question, that process has replaced
substance, that knowledge is increasingly framed by economics and politics as
much as cognitive methodology, that ethical issues have moved to the forefront
in public as well as technical discussions across a broad spectrum of human
activities, from medicine to computers.

The applied philosophical discourses of bioethics,
environmental ethics, computer ethics, and engineering ethics are nevertheless
no more than the tip of an iceberg breaking apart in a sea of metaphysical
speculations (from scientific cosmologies to the new existentialisms of risk
projection, electronic networking, and virtual reality), epistemological
explosions (trans-human and remote sensation and perception, automated
instrumental data gathering and analysis, research articles as advertisements
and promotional campaigns for the next round of funding grants), and aesthetic
constructions (graphic media presentations and probability analyses, hypertext
communications, macro- to micro-engineering projects, interactive Internet web
sites). Food, housing, transportation, communications, economics, art,
literature, music, sex, are all being transformed by technological makings.
These re-makings are themselves the continuous subjects of exoteric and
esoteric theoretical discussions, philosophical debates, and ideological
disputation.

Our world may be shot through with technology, but our
technology is in turn interpenetrated with philosophical dialogue. Indeed, it
is precisely such lifeworld transformations that postmodern philosophy has made
the primary subject of its discourses, even as engineers create the very
transformations that philosophers talk about. But the engineers have remained
silent. Precisely because of their silence, they have in a paradoxical manner
marginalized their powers - failed to recognize themselves and their practices
as central to the cultural superstructure they engender, which in turn
engenders them.

Consider one case in point: the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC). This engineering research center, perhaps even more than Bell
Labs, is one of the truly great innovation centers of history. In the late
1960s and early 1970s it invented virtually all the major elements of what
became the personal computer revolution: the graphic interface, the mouse, etc.
But its corporate sponsor failed to capitalize on its pioneering technical
innovations36. Xerox PARC creativity was stimulated in part by its
philosophical interactions with and sensitivity to cultural developments. At
the same time, on one reasonable interpretation it failed to be able to promote
those innovations because of its passive receptivity with regard to precisely
the philosophical stimuli of the culture.

Mark Weiser, the current chief technologist at Xerox
PARC, influenced by the essentially philosophical reflections of Herbert Simon,
Michael Polanyi, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger, projects beyond
mainframes and personal computers and third wave of what he terms "ubiquitous
computing" or "ubicomp" for short.37 With ubicomp Weiser and other
engineers at Xerox PARC are working to let computers merge into the background
of our lives, to blend in with the environment. Similar radical engineering
innovation centers such as the Media Lab at MIT38 nevertheless
exhibit a strong tendency only to absorb postmodern philosophical influences,
even while they exhibit or live them out.

The engineering design process embodies and exhibits
precisely the kind of contingent, decentered, boundary crossing, and emergent
ordering processes that postmodernity analyzes, explores, and celebrates.
Engineers live but do not speak postmodernism.

Engineers are the unacknowledged philosophers of the
postmodern world. What is distinctive about the material base of postmodernity
is that it is an engineered materiality. Robert Venturi's playful postmodern
architecture is the playfulness of a skilled engineer39.
François Lyotard's postmodern condition of self-reference mimics the
self-referential iterative practices and processes of engineering
design40. Donna Haraway's border-crossing coyote-cyborg could not
exist without biomedical technology.41

For literally thousands of years human making and using
relied on what was given in nature. Under such conditions, artifice remained
unalterably limited in both quantity and substantiality. Indeed, its lack of
quantity was reflected in a hand-and-mind crafted particularity, the evident
beauty of which was never more than skin deep. "If a bed were to sprout," wrote
Aristotle, "not a bed would come up but an oak tree."42

The engineering extraction from nature of both hidden
materials and energies, together with the design of minded machines, made
possible the quantitative proliferation of artifice and its coordinate
standardization. Standardization appeared to deprive the world of crafted
beauty as a necessary trade-off for affluence. The standardization that
engineers constructed, not just with their machines and industrial processes,
but behind the scenes through the negotiation of technical codes, nevertheless
foreshadowed a fabricated substantiality at the base of a new ecology of
artifice.

With the extension of engineering processes into the
micro, nano, genetic, molecular, atomic, and even sub-atomic levels our new
artifacts, when they sprout, sprout not their old matters deprived of form but
in newly informed structures.

No one has lived more deeply in this world living
artifice than engineers. Engineers are only beginning to share their design
lives with the larger world by means of conceptual analysis and critical
reflection. This is an analysis and reflection from which the philosophical
world would nevertheless profit, and to which they might contribute, if they
would but make the effort to begin to enter it.

Why is philosophy important to engineering? Ultimately
and most deeply it is because engineering is philosophy - and through
philosophy engineering will become more itself.

Engineers of the world philosophize! You have nothing to
lose but your silence!43

STS Program

Penn State University

University Par, PA 16802

cxm15@psu.edu

NOTES

1 The classic presentation of this view is, of
course, C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1959); expanded edition: The Two Cultures: And a
Second Look (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).

6 New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed.
(Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1995), Micropaedia, vol. 4, p. 496. The
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 8th ed. (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1997), vol. 6, p. 435, modestly truncates then expands on this
definition when it describes engineering as, "Most simply, the art of directing
the great sources of power in nature for the use and the convenience of humans.
In its modern form [it] involves people, money, materials, machines, and
energy."

7 Cf. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New
York: Macmillan, 1947), p. : "[W]hat we call man's power of nature turns out to
be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument."
[annexed 370.1L585a]

8 For more extended narratives concerning the
engineering philosophies of technology cited below, and related ideas, see Carl
Mitcham, Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and
Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 19-38. Some of
this material can also be found in the author's ¿Qué es la
filosofía de la tecnología? (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1989), part
one.

20 Although "black box" opening has become
identified as a program of (sometimes historically oriented) sociologists of
technology such as Bruno Latour and Wiebe Bijker, the original suggestion came
from engineering historian Edwin Layton's "Conditions of Technological
Development," in Ina Spiegel-Rösing and Derek de Solla Price, eds.,
Science, Technology and Society: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective (Beverly
Hills: Sage, 1977), p. 198. It was then first developed by economist Nathan
Rosenberg in his Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1982) before being put forth as a technology
studies program in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds.,
The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the
Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

26 See Martin Curd and Larry May, Professional
Responsibility for Harmful Actions (Dubuque, IW: Kendall/Hunt, 1984); and John
H. Fielder and Douglas Dirsch, eds., The DC-10 Case: A Study in Applied Ethics,
Technology, and Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

32 For a different but related explication of
this engineering ethical imperative, see Carl Mitcham, "Engineering Design
Research and Social Responsibility," in Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Ethics of
Scientific Research (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), pp. 153-196 and
221-223; reprinted in Kristin Shrader-Frechette and Laura Westra, eds.,
Technology and Values (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), pp. 261-278.

33 R.D. Marshall et al., Investigation of the
Kansas City Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Commerce, National Bureau of Standards, 1982). For Dym's analysis, see Clive L.
Dym, "The Languages of Engineering Design: Representing Objects and
Articulating Processes," paper for a workshop on "The Empirical Turn in the
Philosophy of Technology," Technische Universiteit Delft, 16-18 April 1998.

34 Henry Petroski, To Engineer Is Human: The
Role of Failure in Successful Design (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985).

35 Philosopher C. Thomas Rogers participated
with Unger in engineering ethics research work, and is cited in Unger,
Controlling Technology, p. 115. Philosopher Mike W. Martin co-authored with
engineer Roland Schinzinger, Ethics in Engineering. Philosopher Michael S.
Pritchard has worked extensively with engineers Charles Harris and Michael
Rabins, a collaboration reflected not only in their book Engineering Ethics:
Concepts and Cases but also a collection of more than thirty cases study
scenarios available at http://ethics.tamu.edu.

43 The present argument was first developed as
a public lecture at Technische Universiteit Delft, The Netherlands, 16 April
1998, in conjunction with an international workshop on "The Empirical Turn in
the Philosophy of Technology." A more extended published version is planned by
TU Delft. A proceedings volume from the workshop, to be guest-edited by Peter
Kroes and Anthonie Mejiers, is also scheduled for publication in a future issue
of Research in Philosophy and Technology.